Top rump: A helping hand from a . . . helping hand
for Emily May Smith as Sal. Pictures: Robert Day

Oh no, it isn’t

B2, Coventry Belgrade

****

JUST how much of the bizarre can you fit into
an hour’s staging? Oh No It Isn’t
passes in a swirl of wit and paradox, audience-teasing and mock-tension.

It’s
the last that gives the show it punch. Something heinous is in the air.
Have we just witnessed a murder?
Or are we just about to?

Local writer and director Nick
Walker manages to create mayhem – backstage and frontstage alike – from
an accident-prone production of Jack and the Beanstalk – in which
the quirks of the actors, rather than their actual roles, create a
series of will-they-won’t-they mishaps that offer, as the author says, a
‘spikier’, grown-up take on the traditional panto.

From all the gun-toting, and
the confusion between ‘prop’ and supposed ‘real’ weapons (‘not a Smith
and Wesson; a Glock’), not to mention poisoned apples, it grows
increasingly difficult to believe that a member of the four-man cast
won’t inevitably polish one of the others off. Jealousies flourish,
cordial dislikes abound. Everyone loathes everyone else’s guts. Yet even
given that, the increasingly contorted finale still produces a
delightful surprise.

The four or so characters –
played by
Richard
Kidd and Tom Shepherd, with Emily May Smith and Katy Stephens – are part
of, or the whole of, a pantomime cast. For the first half, we see what
goes on behind stage as three – Daisy the Cow, the evil but twitchy
Giant (the increasingly funny Smith) - plot behind the back of Jack
(Stephens), who is busy maintaining the beanstalk action onstage.

Katy Stephens as Jackie
and
Emily May Smith as Sal again, this time in persuasive mood, with a
goose that
appears to
shoot golden eggs into the air

There’s a good deal of
flapping around at the start, abetted by bovine humour (the
non-coordination of the back half – Kidd – is a hoot), which establish
the zany nature of the show. But it’s really with the entry of Stephens’
Jack (‘I grew up a poor boy’) that things pick up. The script becomes
saucier (‘well, my Cox is bigger than yours’, or ‘We’ll soon find out
who’s firing blanks’; Jack even prises amusing smut out of Hedda
Gabler); wittier and – to the audience – recognisable local
allusions, including to Nuneaton’s Larry Grayson, proliferate (‘You seem
to be confusing this with a night out in Far Gosford Street’); accents
(from the girls) and the all-round bitchiness are funnier; a trio of
ludicrous ditties drums up audience participation, there’s an insane
chase, the delivery sharpens. It gains punch. The chaps, well rehearsed
(Shepherd very strong at the outset), maintain the amiable shambles, but
the girls (including Smith’s wonderful prospective father-in-law Count –
‘I don’t trust the vicious Count) add the icing.

What also helps are the props
and costumes. The cow (‘she was just choking’; ‘she’s cold; in fact
she’s Friesian’) is as perfect for its bizarre murder-abetting role as
any pantomime offering; the goose, which finally furnishes the crucial
lethal weapon, is a treat. But the array of costume paraphernalia at the
side also furnishes just the right amount of stage nonsense; the winner
in the first half is the delicious, goosy backcloth (which we see from
behind, and finally from in front). The design of that hits the jackpot.

The other clever feature about
Walker’s production is that it builds to its finale with growing energy,
helped by this cast’s wonderful ability to alternate between taking
itself ultra-seriously, like a Raymond Chandler sizzler, and not taking
itself seriously at all. That’s a fine art, and it does indeed make for
a sophisticated kind of not-quite-pantomime. It doesn’t claim to be much
more than a Christmas entertainment; and as that, terrifically spoken
and slyly acted, it certainly passes muster. To 27-12-14.